Detrumpization

“Mr. President: Stop the Insanity”

The word “insanity” alone took up half the front page of the most Trumpist newspaper in the United States, the New York Post, accompanied by a photo of a downcast Donald Trump.

In 1968, TV news anchor Walter Cronkite went to Vietnam to report on the war that President Lyndon Johnson claimed the United States was winning. Cronkite saw with his own eyes that that was not what was happening and said so on his program, despite pressure from the White House. He didn’t mean to be hurtful, but he was clear. “[I]t is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could,” Cronkite said.

In other words, Cronkite dismantled years of presidential propaganda with one sentence. And it was said that having seen the broadcast in his office, Johnson reportedly remarked, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I have lost MIddle America.”

Trump has not lost all the support that he had. In fact, his most fanatic base will always believe that the elections were stolen from their president, even though two months after the vote neither Trump nor his army of lawyers have presented any evidence to that effect, and dozens of cases before all kinds of courts, including the Supreme Court, have, without exception, ended in the garbage.

But now there are Trumpist groups that have begun the process of “detrumpization.” Fox News, Trump’s major ally since the 2016 presidential campaign, has done this. Now the New York Post is distancing itself, calling Trump lawyer Sidney Powell crazy. Gen. Michael Flynn, convicted in connection with the Russian plot to influence the 2016 election and recently pardoned by trump, recently suggested that Trump declare martial law, something that is considered to be treasonous. The Post even accused the president on Wednesday of being “obsessed” with the idea of staging an “antidemocratic coup” in avoiding the inevitable: the fact that Joe Biden won the election. For a Trumpist daily newspaper to accuse Trump of plotting an antidemocratic coup shows how far the insanity has gone, so far that even the New York Post puts it on the front page and topped it off with an editorial that asserted, “Democrats will try to write you off as a one-term aberration and, frankly, you’re helping them do it.”

The media that have supported Trump are distancing themselves, and the Republicans are trying to save the day — and their honor — because a Republican Party existed before Trump and they hope that it will continue without him. Republicans have begun a slow and difficult (possibly impossible in the medium term) process of detrumpization, even though a majority of Republican voters remain true to Trump. And Trump will continue feeding the most basic political instincts of his fans, urging them to reject the idea that he is the subject of the greatest failure that a politician can suffer in the United states: winning the presidency, but getting thrown out by voters at the end of his first term.